


A Correspondence

by dancingontheedge



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Betrayal, Censored n-word use, Character Study, Confederate Army, Confederate assholes, F/M, Frank POV, Frank is terrible, Period appropriate confederate leanings, Period-Typical Racism, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-12 19:56:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11744067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancingontheedge/pseuds/dancingontheedge
Summary: Frank somehow missed that Emma broke up with him, and is pining. Then, he receives his first letter from Alice since he left Alexandria, and it lands rather like a bomb.





	A Correspondence

**Author's Note:**

> Both Frank and Alice are extremely racist fuckers in this story. Here there be dragons, gird your loins, and all that jazz. Alice's letter contains the n-word twice; censored, because I find that I cannot bring myself to write it. Also, Frank is an asshole (even separate from the whole racist thing), and there is a rather graphic memory of one way closet business in 2.01 might have gone down.

If Frank Stringfellow could be said to have two passions, they would be-- in an order that shifted from hour to hour -- the Confederacy and Emma Green. Accordingly, he was taking the failures of early July, 1862 quite hard. He had been the cause of the failure to assassinate Mr. Lincoln-- or, rather more accurately, his failure to understand the priorities of his lady love was the cause. He and Miss Green had suffered a failure of communication caused entirely by Frank's shifting priorities, for when Emma had come to him for help he had dismissed her out of hand, not even hearing her entreaties in his absorption with the tunnel in the wall of the dentist's office. Frank's lack of attention had driven her to listen to that Holy Joe, Henry Hopkins, which caused Frank to scupper the plan in a most dramatic fashion at the last possible second. After this, their communication problems continued as Frank returned to prioritizing the Cause over his fiancee. Or, at the very least, refusing to share actions that he felt would not make Emma proud. 

His suspicions on this measure had borne out, as Emma had somehow discovered his plot and coldly expelled him from his hiding place in her family's cellar. This had been quite a shock, after the vigorous passion of a week before, when she had allowed him to undo her bodice and stays and let his hands creep up her skirts to the sensitive skin behind her knees. She had stopped him, breath heaving, by wrapping her hand around his neck, thumb and middle finger pressing into the hollows below his ears, and forcing his face away from her nipple. She had held him firm by the neck as he had strained back toward her, his mind on nothing so much as the smooth expance of skin that she had allowed him to touch. So focused was he on her still exposed breasts, heaving tantalizingly mere inches from his face, that he scarce heard her breathy protestations about propriety and marriage as she assiduously removed his right hand from where it was creeping past her knee and his left from its position kneading her right breast (no doubt the source of her continued breathlessness). And so she held him quite still as she rose from the floor of the cellar, with one hand pressing firmly around his neck and the other holding one of his wrists strongly away from her person. She turned away from him then, doing up her bodice with alacrity and leaving him bereft. If standing would not have made him dizzy, he would have done so, and buried his face in the crook of his fiancee's neck. Standing behind her, he would have sucked assiduously at the place she had applied the pressure of her thumb to force his head to remain at distance and returned his hands to her breasts. 

Recalling the heat of that embrace now, four months later and back with a regiment, he felt his eyelids growing heavy and his breath growing short with remembered passion. Another member of the regiment-- one Timothy James III-- came up behind him, clapping him on the shoulder. Timothy took one look at Frank's face and started chuckling. 

"You look in desperate need of a whore," he said, "let me take you to Estrella."

And so Frank let himself be led to the tents of the camp followers, and then to one particular tent that Estrella-- a buxom blonde with crooked teeth-- shared with no less than three of her compatriots. 

Forty-five minutes later, a much more relaxed Frank Stringfellow left Estrella's tent with significantly lighter pockets. He had no way of knowing it, but she had charged him extra when she saw he had only Confederate paper money, and extra again for calling her Emma throughout. 

That night, a letter arrived from Alice. The first part was a cleverly disguised code they had devised on the road as he had fled Alexandria. It related the burning of her father's factory, the dogged pursuit of Pinkerton, and what Pinkerton had been perilously close to finding. The whole of it, for she had extracted from a drunk and depressed Jimmy what else the investigator had stood to find in the warehouse. It also provided key information about how the potential alliance with Britain had come crashing down around their ears. All this disguised as mindless society gossip. Frank paused after finishing those paragraphs and contemplated the brilliance of Alice's mind for a moment. Then he dove back in. It was a long letter-- Union occupied Alexandria was not experiencing a paper shortage. This new section brought news of Frank's other passion. It dripped with scorn, which initially made Frank bristle. But then he reached the meat of the section. 

> Emma has abandoned us. Shortly after you left, it reached daddy's ears that there had been no Confederates at the hotel for more than two weeks. Yet Emma still insisted on dressing in rags and going there, even on Sundays. Often, she would return with blood stains ringing the bottom two inches of her unfashionable calicos. The confrontation that ensued revealed that she has abandoned the Cause and is now in the employ of the Federal Army. She has refused ardently to bend to our parents will and cease her work. 

Reading this, Frank was on the verge of dismissing it all as a fit of pique on Emma's part. She was angry at him, he knew, but their love would prevail. He had, somehow, failed to grasp that in expelling him from her cellar, Emma had also been expelling him from her life. Had she known of his visit to Estrella she would not have been incensed, but instead disappointed anew in the failings of his moral character. 

> She has lost all care for her reputation, staying away from home all night several times even before she lost her senses and moved into a tiny attic room at the hotel, where once two of daddy's slaves slept. Two of her sets of rags were intended for a house girl before she was freed by the Yankees. I fear my sister has gone utterly mad. 

This account filled Frank with indignation that the Yankees would use a gentle lady so. He, like Alice, feared for the soundness of his fiancee's mind, and the account was becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss. He had cast the Union Army firmly in the category of "cause" for this disastrous effect on Emma's life, failing to see that his own actions and Emma's innate stubbornness and compassion had driven her actions. Had he but asked her, she would have responded with queries of her own. How can a person be so heartless to leave anybody suffering so? How could any person conspire to harm wounded men and those intent on caring for them? It was a fundamental difference in worldview, for Frank was inured to compassion. He had become so at the age of 13, the first time his father sent him to the tobacco fields with a whip. This was not a task he had told Emma of, for she would have been disgusted. Her father refused to have his relatively few slaves beaten, and Emma had always been nothing but polite to them. Had she seen the various degradations visited on them by Jimmy or Alice's pinching punishments she would have been horrified. But Emma had been blind, and sheltered from the banned abolitionist literature, and had believed slavery to be a benign wrong rather than an active evil. Yet another illusion that her time at Mansion House had shattered, and perhaps the one shattered most thoroughly. 

> She has been seen often in the company of runways and dirty little n***** children, delivering chalk and primers to their dirty little school as no good woman would. Mama said she looked at that Yankee preacher with stars in her eyes as he used scripture to denounce what all gentlepersons know to be the true place of the race of Ham. She has betrayed us, Frank. Cavorting unescorted with Yankees and n***** without a care for her reputation. Since Antietam, she had been seen walking through the streets on that preacher's arm, flirting up at him in her ugly rags, unchapperoned. It has been giving daddy palpitations, for one of the times she was gone all night she had gone to the front with him. Frank, she is unworthy of you. 

And with that, Frank flew into a bitterly jealous rage. His face flushed red, then quickly faded to a sickly pallor. Timothy returned to the tent, took one look at Frank, and pulled the letter from his unprotesting fingers. He fully expected to find news of a death at home. He skimmed the letter, and "Emma had abandoned us," jumped out at him, and he began reading in earnest. When he was finished, Timothy silently passed his flask of whiskey to Frank, who promptly downed half of it. 

"We'll find us a battle, Frank, and collect enough Yankee bones to make a bauble for every girl in three counties except her."

**Author's Note:**

> Historical notes:  
> The confederacy suffered extreme paper shortages starting in summer, 1862. Alice would not be feeling it in a union occupied city, but Frank would, with the troops. 
> 
> It was common practice for soldiers to make jewelry from the bones of their fallen enemies and send them home to their sweethearts, wives, and female relations. This is true of both sides of the army.
> 
> Alice's letter relating her sister's "immoral" activities also matches the historical record. Soldiers would often receive letters relating the behavior of their various relatives, and letters from soldiers to their wayward relatives survive, in all their scathing glory. That includes letters to sisters admonishing them for interacting with union soldiers and letters to other relatives railing against political stances (especially union soldiers to copperhead relatives).


End file.
